A social networking system presents content to its users for consumption. The content presented to a given user is often generated by actions of other users in the system. Certain content may become stale over time thereby eventually losing its overall relevance in a current time period. A common approach to preventing stale content from being presented to users is to filter from presentation any content that was generated more than a static amount of time ago. The rate at which different types of content become stale, however, is not uniform. Therefore, such static filtering is not a broadly applicable mechanism for preventing stale content from being presented because the filter can be both over and under inclusive.